by Robin Roenker
In the U.S. Supreme Court’s more than 230 years of existence it has issued approximately 10 rulings on Second Amendment cases—the first in 1876. In 2024, the Court ruled in two Second Amendment cases—U.S. v. Rahimi, which addressed the constitutionality of banning gun rights for domestic abusers, and Garland v. Cargill, which addressed banning bump stocks. The Second Amendment states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
To understand the Court’s ruling in the 2024 cases, we need to go back to its 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which expanded gun rights and established a new standard for evaluating restrictions on the right to bear arms. With Bruen, the Court struck down New York’s strict gun permitting system and ruled that laws limiting gun ownership must be based on the “historical tradition of firearm regulation” in the U.S. In other words, determining whether or not a particular gun restriction is or is not constitutional under the Second Amendment would now depend on historical legal precedent.
“With the Bruen case, the Court essentially determined that the way to adjudicate these cases is to ask whether the modern gun law being challenged is consistent with history and tradition. So, it’s certainly a very different test,” explains Andrew Willinger, a professor at Duke University School of Law and executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.
Before the Bruen ruling, courts tended to evaluate the legality of gun ownership restrictions by weighing both public safety concerns and an individual’s right to carry firearms, as outlined by the Second Amendment. Giffords Law Center is an organization that promotes gun violence prevention and gun safety laws in the United States. It is led by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who was shot by a gunman at a 2011 constituent event in Tucson, Arizona. In 2023, one year after the Bruen decision, Giffords Law Center released a memo analyzing challenges to gun safety laws.
“Bruen has caused a great deal of confusion and disruption as lower federal courts struggled to follow the new methodology it mandated,” William Clark, a litigation attorney at Giffords Law Center wrote in the memo. “But our analysis shows that even after Bruen, courts are upholding state, federal, and local gun laws against Second Amendment challenges. Most courts have recognized that, when properly applied, Bruen allows for a wide range of gun violence prevention laws.”
Laura Edwards, a Princeton University legal historian, who, along with other historians, submitted an amicus brief in the 2024 Rahimi case, told The Washington Post, “What you’re seeing is the Court confronting the complications of using the past as the means of securing and legitimatizing legal principles. History does not have definitive answers for you.”
Domestic abusers
In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified its stance on legal firearm limits. In an 8 to 1 decision, the Court upheld a federal ban on gun ownership for people who have existing domestic violence restraining orders. That decision, in U.S. v. Rahimi, represented the Court’s first major Second Amendment ruling since the Bruen decision.
“Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Court’s majority opinion in Rahimi. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” Essentially, to be “trapped in amber” refers to being stuck or frozen in time, unable to change or move forward.
“In Rahimi, you had a man who had abused and threatened his girlfriend firing a gun in a public place and putting people at risk,” Professor Willinger says. “Given the facts of the case, it was hard to see the Supreme Court agreeing with the Fifth Circuit, which had earlier ruled that a ban against people with domestic violence restraining orders was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.”
To provide the historical tradition that Bruen required, in Rahimi, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit cited the fact that domestic violence laws did not exist at the time the Second Amendment was adopted. No laws addressed domestic violence and gun ownership, at the time, therefore, the law in question was unconstitutional, according to the Fifth Circuit Court.
In a lone dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the Fifth Circuit, writing, “The court and government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence.”
However, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “When a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may—consistent with the Second Amendment—be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect. Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms.”
According to Professor Willinger, the Rahimi ruling required the U.S. Supreme Court to “modify, in some sense, what the majority had said in the Bruen case, since you’re not going to find the specific types of domestic violence laws we have today, if you look back historically.”
The ruling helped clarify the Court’s view that firearms restrictions do not necessarily require a precise “historical twin” to be constitutional. But they do need to defer to historic laws that are “relevantly similar” in how they were passed and applied. The Rahimi ruling was limited in its scope. It did not attempt to broadly settle the many challenges on gun restrictions that have emerged since Bruen, including, for example, the constitutionality of restrictions on gun ownership by convicted felons and drug users.
In addition, existing restrictions on places where weapons may be carried, including laws that restrict weapons on school grounds or in public sports arenas, may be challenged at the Court in the coming years. According to Professor Willinger, Bruen said the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a gun in public for self-defense.
“That opens up a whole new set of questions about whether or not a state can nevertheless say, for example, that you can’t take your gun into a bar or onto the subway,” Professor Willinger explains.
Bump stocks
In a separate court decision, also from June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on bump stocks that had been in effect since 2018. A bump stock is a modification to the standard stock or base of a rifle that, once added, allows it to fire much more rapidly.
Following a mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 in which bump stocks had been used, killing 60 people and wounding 400, the first Trump administration moved to have the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ban bump stocks. The ATF argued that bump stocks turned legal rifles into machine guns, noting that the Las Vegas shooter was able to fire 1,000 rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes.
Machine guns are banned for civilians in the U.S. under the National Firearms Act, which Congress passed in 1934 and amended in1986. The existing U.S. federal ban on machine guns defines them as weapons able to fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”
In a 6-3 ruling in Garland v. Cargill the U.S. Supreme Court found that bump stocks do not qualify as machine guns as defined by the National Firearms Act. The Court, therefore, rescinded the U.S. federal bump stock ban. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the Court’s majority opinion in the case and explained that bump stocks cannot be considered machine guns, since they still require the shooter to “release and reset the trigger between every shot.”
Professor Willinger explains that Garland v. Cargill was not technically a Second Amendment case. “It was really an administrative law case,” he says. “It centered on a question of statutory interpretation regarding the meaning of the term ‘machine gun’ and how that term was defined in the National Firearms Act.”
In her dissenting opinion in the case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced her belief that the decision unfairly dismissed the profound operational similarities between rifles outfitted with bump stocks and machine guns.
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.”
Justice Samuel Alito agreed with the majority of the Court in the case but issued a concurring opinion. Addressing the horrific event in Las Vegas that led to the case, Justice Alito wrote, “An event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.”
In his opinion, Justice Alito went on to write, “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns. Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation,” Justice Alito wrote. “Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”
Banning gun sales to teenagers
Another Second Amendment case that may end up at the U.S. Supreme Court for a final ruling is Reese v. ATF—another decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, issued in January 2025. In this case, the Fifth Circuit struck down a federal handgun ban for 18-to-20-year-olds, citing the Militia Act of 1792, which required “every free able-bodied white male citizen” between the ages of 18 and 45 to join his state militia and provide his own weapon, usually a musket or a rifle.
“Ultimately, the text of the Second Amendment includes eighteen-to-twenty-year-old individuals among ‘the people’ whose right to keep and bear arms is protected,” Judge Edith Jones wrote for a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit. “The federal government has presented scant evidence that eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds’ firearm rights during the founding-era were restricted in a similar manner to the contemporary federal handgun purchase ban.”
The Fifth Circuit’s decision only applies to Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. However, if the case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, it could have an effect nationwide.
Discussion Questions
- What do you think of the U.S. Supreme Court’s “historical test” from its Bruen ruling? Why do you think it caused so much confusion in determining the constitutionality of gun safety laws?
- What do you think about bump stocks? Do you agree or disagree that they should be considered machine guns? Explain your answer.
Glossary Words
adjudicate— to act as a judge.
amicus brief—a friend of the court brief, which is submitted by an entity with strong interests in a case but not a party in the case.
concurring opinion— a separate opinion delivered by one or more justices or judges that agrees with the decision of the court but not for the same reasons.
dissenting opinion— a statement written by a judge or justice that disagrees with the opinion reached by the majority of his or her colleagues.
majority opinion— a statement written by a judge or justice that reflects the opinion reached by the majority of their colleagues.
rescind—to void an act or an order.
restraining order—a court order issued to prohibit someone from approaching or contacting a specified person.
statutory— based on legislative enactment.
upheld— supported; kept the same.
This article originally appeared in the spring 2025 issue of The Legal Eagle.